


Super Sargasso Sea

by azhdarchidaen



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Likely Highly Pretentious and Equally Loose Calculus Metaphors, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 22:05:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6772051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azhdarchidaen/pseuds/azhdarchidaen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noted paranormal researcher Charles Fort once postulated that there exists a place where things from our own Earth disappear to. A distant dimension of lost things. </p><p>No one knows how serious his suggestion was. </p><p>Ford is fairly certain he's in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Super Sargasso Sea

_"The crux here, and the limit beyond which we may not go--very much--is:_

_Acceptance that there is a region which we call the Super-Sargasso Sea-- not yet_  
_fully accepted, but a provisional position that has received a great deal of support..._  
_I suppose some day such queries will sound absurd--the thing will be so obvious..."_

 _-_ Charles Fort _, The Book of the Damned_

 

* * *

 

One of the more surprising side-effects of being flung headfirst into constant impossibility was greeting circumstances that, once, maybe, would have left you dazzled, instead as nothing so much as “bleary-eyed”

Ford had always prided himself on having a certain inner curiosity. When all else -- and there were an exceedingly high number of “else”s -- failed, there was a core, fallback part of him that would still be passionate about something, interested in learning more. Keeping him going.

It still fired up, of course, on the other side of the portal. How could it not, in the strangest and most unfamiliar place he’d found himself yet? Contrary to what he’d feared on gathering his senses enough to think coherently after first falling through, every second he spent in a dimension that was not his own didn’t automatically spell “waking nightmare” -- those days came, and he dealt with them as he could, but there were others where that fascination with everything, even his current circumstances, was allowed to bubble up. There were mornings where he was excited to greet a new day, because it meant new experiences, new discoveries… new observations...

And then there were the mornings where he just woke up.

The truth was, while he had more fuel for his curiosity than ever, an interdimensional existence also had the consistent tendency to mercilessly dry it up. Somewhere in the midst of the fog of stress and confusion that was the planet-hopping on dubiously space-worthy vehicles, the worrying where he’d find the next thing he even considered edible, and the general feeling of drifting alone, it would get stretched, crushed. Maybe not disintegrated -- it was too core to him for that, Ford was almost certain that if it ever disappeared wholly, _he_ wouldn’t be the person who was left behind -- but so bent out of shape and under stress that it needed serious repair.

He might be haggling to secure passage on spacecraft with his mechanical knowledge, but something told him human beings ( _perhaps even, melodramatically, “souls”_ ) needed a sort of patching-up he didn’t know how to administer.

Oh, to be as simply soldered as a spaceship.

Ford sighed, staring into the thermos of liquid he’d intended to drink this morning. “Liquid” because it wasn’t quite coffee, just the closest equivalent he had right now, and “intended” because… well… he wouldn’t be contemplating this if it wasn’t one of _those_ mornings in the first place. They were starting to get awfully frequent.

He knew there was no logical reason to let it kill his appetite, that in just a matter of minutes someone from the deck area would probably pound on the door of the almost-literal storage closet he was currently occupying as lodgings and tell him another vital piece of machinery had gone haywire and it was time for him to earn his spot on the vessel, that if he didn’t at least go through the motions this morning, he’d regret it this afternoon. But all he could seem to muster at the moment was to gently nurse the container, wondering how and why it was that he’d ended up feeling so tired. Not necessarily sleepy, but... tired.

_In calculus, the limit of a function is the value that it approaches, but never quite reaches. Values calculated using the equation will continue to get infinitely close to it, disregarding the occasional vertical asymptote, but never quite reach the limit._

It was a crude paraphrase of the concept, but like most things he scrapped together these days, Ford would let it pass. For the sake of metaphor, at least, because it was the only approximation ( _one, ironically, "approaching closeness?"_ ) of his thoughts he could manage. The current events and/or situation might not be quite enough to break him -- might not be that absolute, upper limit in which he would be so utterly disheartened that he would cease to be “Stanford Pines” and instead abandon entirely things like his sense of wonder, his conviction that the world would continue to be interesting so long as he explored it -- but it was starting to feel like he was constantly skirting it.

It almost hurt more, to know that something deep inside you was still the person you’d always been, but that it was getting choked out by overwhelming input. Frustration with your circumstances. Pervasive loneliness.

_Limits._

There was a pounding on the door, and Ford sighed as he set down his things, realizing he’d already dragged his feet enough to have caused probable complications later. He grabbed his makeshift hooded cowl (a generous description for what was really just a glorified several yards of cloth, a gift he’d received a few dimensions back from a grateful merchant after he’d helped her defend her caravan), reminding himself he’d need it in the environment of the engine room. The leaking fumes aside, this ship was propelled using liquid nitrogen.

(A prime example of the kind of thing he was frustrated by at the moment -- so many times in the past, Ford would have leapt at the chance to work directly with a widespread and perfected method of cryogenic energy storage, but his whole time on the ship he’d only been able to think of it as “damn cold”)

“Human, there’s a problem with the--”

“--Engine room?” he asked, already acknowledging that was the closest he would get to a greeting from the assistant engineer who’d come to fetch him -- a large, purple alien creature that resembled nothing so much as a multi-limbed aardvark.

The curt nod in response was about all he expected, but it’s enough. He’d find something in it to be grateful about, maybe. Like the fact that it didn’t send the battered translation device in his ear sparking the way it did half the time it would when it actually worked. ( _The consequences of bartering for the thing secondhand, unfortunately. And a highly nomadic lifestyle.)_

It was a good number of hours ( _or “intervals” as they seem to be called here…_ being completely honest Ford wasn’t sure the word actually referred to the 60 minutes he’d mentally assigned it, but as his days were entirely dictated by what work there was to be done at the moment, it didn't really matter -- things took him as long as they took) before he had time to dwell on his thoughts again -- although it was with slightly frostbitten fingers, and a mind that still wasn't sure it wanted to.

Breathing softly on his hands ( _gloves… what he needed to prioritize next place he ended up was either finding or making some decent gloves…_ ) to warm them once he’d unwrapped the cowl, Ford contemplated how he was planning on spending the rest of the evening. He was a bit sore… he also never got around to having much to eat, minus the nutrient capsules he kept shoved in his pockets and had turned to during a brief break in the repairs today to keep himself from getting unreasonably shaky…

It was just… he still didn’t have much of an appetite. Logically, he knew he needed to be more sparing with those things. The capsules, he meant. They were somewhat tricky to come by, and very intentionally stored away for warding off starvation on days he couldn’t find _anything_ to eat -- a complication that struck him more often than it should, due to his many sensory aversions. And he’d had at least a few packs of edible, if freeze-dried, food back in his quarters here. But this morning something had turned him off about eating any of them, and the feeling still persisted.

He didn’t like that those were the only sorts of feelings he could pin down solidly right now.

Not even bothering to kick off his boots, Ford found himself lying on his back and settling in slightly on the cot that served as the single piece of furniture in the small room. Staring at the ceiling seemed as productive a venue as he was going to be able to pursue at the moment. He still didn’t really feel like eating. Maybe if he looked at the worn metal ceiling, rust creeping along the edges of it and exhibiting the general level of disarray he’d come to expect from this ship, his thoughts would wander someplace other than his current situation, or painful calculus metaphors to try to put words to it.

_The more precisely a position is determined, the less precisely the--_

Physics. Apparently now his brain was going with physics metaphors.

He sighed. As much as he’d been thinking it would be nice to avoid again falling prey to melancholy personal analysis, the comparison was actually rather apt. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dealt with both position and momentum, and if he were to sort the things currently giving him grief into nice orderly categories ( _as nice of categories as messy things like emotions, which he tended to dislike due to their_ dis- _orderly tendencies, would sort into),_ those weren’t bad names for them.

Position: far from home, whatever “home” even was anymore.

Momentum: struggling to maintain any, if his petty fight against breakfast was any sign.

And, of course, there was the principle itself: “ _The more precisely a position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant.”_

The more precisely he thought about his distance from anywhere -- or even anyone, given how infrequently he was now acknowledged -- with the potential to ease his state of frustrating apathy, the more he struggled to have any momentum at all.

_“And vice versa.”_

Which proved true as well -- at least the momentum of mind ( _and finger…_ )-numbing repair tasks kept him distracted. Having some kind of forward motion always made him think about his stranded-ness less, or at least in a fuzzier, more forgiving light. When he was catching a glimpse of brand-new stars, or a ride on a phenomena like the auroral winds of Dimension 13, it was so much easier to keep that fragile bubble of excitement -- of wonder, of movement, of “Stanford Pines” -- intact.

Except sometimes, looking up and seeing someone else’s constellations was more like a punch to the gut.

Sometimes he couldn’t help but wonder if the changing winds were just taking him further and further from any place that could feel like home.

Keeping his momentum worked, but only if position remained out of sight, and out of mind, Otherwise, he just succumbed to… well…

_Uncertainty._

He fumbled awkwardly with the pocket that held the nutrition capsules, finally admitting he was still lightheaded from working today and still didn’t know if he had it in him to try anything better. Maybe they were best reserved for survival, but maybe sometimes “survival” meant dealing with nothing so exciting as ravenous wild beasts or harsh and barely-traversable landscapes, but just a hazy, confusing fog -- the kind that made you lie on your bed, staring at the ceiling, and trying to process messy emotions you couldn’t fit into neat little boxes with math and science you actually understood.

Momentum.

Position.

Limits.

_Infinitely approaching but never quite reaching knowing imprecisely uncertainty movement sufficiently close (?) estimations approximations and functions._

Funny how even his attempts at understanding all seemed to revolve heavily around the concept of not-knowing. Not-knowing was something Ford had had drilled into him he was never allowed to do. He was supposed to have answers. Or find answers. He was supposed to be the one who gave them and knew them and that’s what people saw in him. Maybe part of his current haze was the slow acceptance that he didn’t have very many at all, and he wasn’t going to find them, and where did that leave him as the person who was supposed to always have _all_  the answers, and was never allowed to be wrong?

And yet there not-knowing lurked, at the very core of the fields he’d made a priority to know things _about_. Messy lines and impossibility and somehow.... somehow finding ways to work around it.

Maybe that was the philosophy he needed to cling to right now. Maybe, if he never got out of here, never _fixed_ this (and with failure after failure to land in his own dimension, and the way he got here too dangerous to even _wish_ someone would use it to get him back....) it was the one he needed to adopt for the rest of his life.

Maybe it was the one he should have been using a lot more, a lot earlier.

Ford sat up, adjusting the position of his cracked glasses (which had slid all the way up to his forehead when he pushed a hand across his face in both thought and frustration) as he did so and taking a deep breath. He was going to add a couple more “maybe”s to that already extensive pile. Because maybe he did need to resort to using another capsule tonight, and maybe he’d need to tomorrow morning. Maybe he’d regret it later. But if all the functions and concepts that had been swarming in his head had produced a formula to follow -- a formula of “Ford” that would give some result so long as he plugged in variables -- it was one that said “do what you need to”

Do what he needed to and just keep moving, just keep going, just keep his momentum.

Do what he needed to and push onwards because this was not his breaking point -- it may be a limit, but whatever his brain was telling him and how close it may seem, he wasn't going to hit it.

Do what he needed to and try not to be ashamed.

Do what he needed to, and shelter that little bubble, that enthusiasm, that thing he actually liked about himself, so it could shine out some other time, in the future. It really was a part of him, that’s why it felt like such an important one. And instead of being scared he might lose it, understand that same thing means as long as he was still around, it was too.

There would be days for more sketches, more journal entries, more laughing as strange, bioluminescent almost-birds landed on his jacket sleeve, more climbing craggy cliffs to watch a binary sunrise, more truly incredible machines to take apart (and hopefully put back together…), more breathtaking starry vistas, more incredible stories to piece together as he lived them.

And there would probably be more days of staring at the ceiling too.

But he would try to get by on the things he’d been so scared to admit he needed for a long, long time. On approximations and maybes and imprecision and hypotheses.  
  
Maybe it was okay to have a few uncertainties.


End file.
